For Business, New Season Means Cash : Fitness Purveyors Profit From Sun

The calendar says Jan. 1 is New Year’s Day, but people in the beach cities know better. For many who live and work along the coast, Memorial Day is a better mark of a new beginning--the start of another beach season.

By then, the sun lingers for 14 hours and 19 minutes, a full 4 1/2 hours longer than on the shortest day of the year, Dec. 21. When the sun reaches its zenith in the Northern Hemisphere on June 21, Southern California will be treated to 14 hours and 31 minutes of glorious sun.

Beach merchants can already hear their cash registers ringing.

There is a “five- or six-month period of time when you have to do three-fourths of your business,” said Jim Graham, director of marketing and promotions for the Redondo Beach Pier. “If they don’t have a good summer, it’s going to be a very, very long winter. We really have to blast in the summer.”

Leading the “blast” are purveyors of fitness, health and beauty.

Advertising Focus

It begins each spring when businesses begin to focus the public on their physical shortcomings.

An advertisement for the Torrance Athletic Club in a recent edition of the Easy Reader, the popular tabloid for the beach cities, inquires, “Swimsuit Too Tight?”

It answers, “We Can Help!”

And warns, “Last Chance.”

A perfectly sculpted beach god and goddess are pictured, flexing their muscles. The club offers a three-month, $99 summer special.

“People have just realized they are going to go to the beach,” said Tom Doolin, owner of the Torrance Athletic Club. “They go try on bathing suits and they realize they have to lose a few pounds before summer.”

The fitness ads seem to make their point.

Sue Schmid, manager of Body Tone in Torrance, said the electronic muscle stimulation parlor is seeing about 35 clients a day, compared to the 15 a day who passed through its doors in midwinter.

“Stimulation,” according to a Body Tone ad, “can give you the hard body you’ve been looking for without the investment in time and sweat that physical exercise demands.”

A 20-session package costs $400.

Swimsuit Shopping

When optimum tautness has been achieved, the next stop for women could be any of the bikini boutiques that dot the coast.

Pat Brenner, who owns the Beach Bee bikini shop in Hermosa Beach, says high-cut bikini bottoms will still be in this season. It’s a trend she says her shop helped bring north from Rio beaches about 12 years ago.

Trying on the small suits--which can cost as much as $50--is often a traumatic experience. Saleswomen must advise customers honestly but gently, Brenner says.

“We’ll tell them if they need a fuller back or whether they can wear an even smaller one,” Brenner said. “We’ll tell them if they really don’t look good in it.”

Fluorescent colors will be particularly hot this summer, says Brenner, who makes 60% of her own suits in the small room behind her shop.

Body Cult

The seasonal fitness boom is a healthy tradition for most, but psychotherapists say summer signals the toughest time of year for clients overwhelmed by the Cult of the Body.

“This time of year can be dangerous. It can be very dangerous,” said Robbin Grossman of the Rader Institute eating disorders clinic in Redondo Beach. “Many men and women who live near the beach are very concerned about their body image, and they have distorted body images.”

This means that women already suffering from anorexia nervosa, a chronic obsession with weight loss, become even more weight-conscious when swimsuit weather arrives, Grossman said.

She said others suffer from a less-publicized condition called exercise bulimia, in which men and women go on eating binges and then purge the calories with obsessive exercise.

“These people become absorbed in themselves and their exercise,” Grossman said. “There is no room for their work or their spouse or their children.”

Diane Hill, a therapist in Hermosa Beach, sees the syndrome increase in summer.

“I think it’s easy to talk about your weight and your tan instead of looking at what is within,” Hill said. “The real question is: What is your self-image?”